Tide Pools Are Everywhere: Lessons in Learning to See on Land and in Literature
by Jaime Allesandrine, Haddam-Killingworth High School, Higganum, CT, 2011
Overview
This lesson plan encourages you to bring your students outdoorswith the goal of helping them appreciate both their own setting and Steinbeck’s settings on a deeper, more detailed level. Students will undertake intensive, repeated observations of one small piece of land on the school grounds, bringing their attention right down to the level of the insects among the pebbles and grass. In this way, they will replicate the experience Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts, the noted marine biologist, shared when they explored themarine animals and plants in the intertidal. This lesson plan is ideal for use before or during students’ study ofCannery Row,The Grapes of Wrath, andThe Log from the Sea of Cortez, or other works in which setting is a prominent feature. While this lesson plan spans the school year, it can be modified to entail only one visit outdoors; materials can also be modified. This lesson can be used with any grade level in English, science, or social science classes.
Procedure
Gathering materials in advance…
One way or another, arrange for someone at Home Depot to cut enough ½-inchPVC pipe for each of your students to make a half-meter square quadrat (or buy cutters). Next, pick up four small elbow joints for each student. (At most, each quadrat will cost $3.00; students could pair up.) Bring the supplies & one assembled quadrat to school. Students will use their quadrats to for their outdoor observations.
Begin the lesson with students…
Distribute plain white paper (perhaps large sheets) to students, and explain that this is an exercise to help focus their thoughts on their own daily setting—the school. Students will each create a personal, detailed map of the school, paying close attention to both the indoor and outdoor places on campus that hold particular importance to them. For example, they might note their English classes over the years, their favorite lunch table, athletic fields, places where they’ve learned life lessons, etc. Encourage students to include several details and brief narrative descriptions on their maps so that each one reflects each student’s individual experiences. Also, encourage them to draw with careful precision or wild abandon or anywhere in between. When all have finished, have them share their work in groups of three. Following this, students who wish to share their maps with the whole class may do so, either on their own or through mutual sharing. You could display the maps in the classroom. No doubt your students will discuss various settings and types of people that comprise your school community. This would be a good time to briefly discuss how the school is analogous to the tide pools that Steinbeck and Ricketts explored.
Now that students have considered the big picture, move the focus of the discussion to the outdoors and narrow the scope of their thinking. Ask them to consider which places around the school might be the most interesting to look at more closely. Which places are home to insect and plant communities? Where is there life toobserve? Which places are most prone to seasonal changes? Students may suggest places on their maps or places they’ve never considered until now. Explain that each student will select a half-meter spot outdoors to observe and examine throughout the year on a monthly basis (or just once, depending on feasibility). At this point, show your sample quadrat, and allow students to assemble theirs.
Now, with quadrats and field notebooks in hand, bring the class outdoors; it’s best to keep the students in one general area. Have students select the spots that they’d like to observe. (Perhaps they can use the GPS on their phones to mark their exact spots for future reference.) Have them place their quadrats in their chosen spots, and focus their attention only within this space. Students should have at least 20-30 minutes to get acquainted with their half-meter of land and write in their field notebooks. Emphasize the importance of pace and posture; they must be very patient in their observations, and get very close to the land to see as much as possible. This level of engagement could be called, as Susan Shillinglaw said, “student as hermit crab.”
As they take their field notes, encourage students to:
*Sketch the landscape within their quadrat.
*Ask open- and closed-ended questions of the landscape.
*Write detailed observations of what they see.
*Predict how the landscape will change with the seasons.
*Compare what they see on the ground with what they see in their daily lives.
Students may enjoy returning to the spots they selected on a monthly basis throughout the school year. This would allow them to keep an authentic field notebook, and truly enhance their attention to and appreciation of details in nature and literature. In English class, their field notebooks could be the catalyst for a wide variety of writing lessons and projects. Students could write poetry, fictional vignettes, personal essays, narrative lists, detailed character and setting sketches, interviews with the landscape… And through this writing, students could enhance their attention to precise detail, vivid imagery, verb choices, sentence variety… Help students make meaningful connections between their own detailed writing and the details in Steinbeck’s writing. Hopefully, this experience will also lead students to think more deeply about their own relationship to the land on which they live and their participation in the community. There is no limit to the benefits that can come from this careful, sustained, and up-close examination of the land.
Connections to Steinbeck and other works
Many excerpts from Steinbeck are closely connected to this lesson plan. As a result of their own examinations of the land, students will be better prepared to appreciate the beauty in Steinbeck’s rich descriptions.
The following excerpts, for example, could be read in isolation and used as models for students’ own writing.
From Cannery Row (1945):
Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals…. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock…. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. (p. 31)
Early morning is a time of magic in Cannery Row. In the gray time after the light has come and before the sun has risen, the Row seems to hang suspended out of time in a silvery light. The street lights go out, and the weeds are a brilliant green. The corrugated iron of the canneries glows with the pearly lucence of platinum or old pewter…. It is a time of great peace, a deserted time, a little era of rest. Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. (p. 81)
From The Grapes of Wrath (1939):
The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet. And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass. His hard legs and yellow-nailed feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along. (p. 14)
On a night the wind loosened a shingle and flipped it to the ground. The next wind pried into the hole where the shingle had been, lifted off three, and the next, a dozen. The midday sun burned through the hole and threw a glaring spot on the floor. The wild cats crept in from the fields at night, but they did not mew at the doorstep any more. They moved like shadows of a cloud across the moon, into the rooms to hunt the mice. And on windy nights the doors banged, and the ragged curtains fluttered in the broken windows. (p. 116-7)
From The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951):
The exposed rocks had looked rich with life under the lowering tide, but they were more than that: they were ferocious with life. There was an exuberant fierceness in the littoral here, a vital competition for existence. Everything seemed speeded-up; starfish and urchins were more strongly attached than in other places, and many of the univalves were so tightly fixed that the shells broke before the animals would let go their hold. Perhaps the force of the great surf which beats on this shore has much to do with the tenacity of the animals here. It is noteworthy that the animals, rather than deserting such beaten shores for the safe cove and protected pools, simply increase their toughness and fight back at the sea with a kind of joyful survival. (p. 49)
From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (1994):
There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness, a sign that God is implicit in all of creation. Or maybe you are not predisposed to see the world sacramentally, to see everything as an outward and visible sign of inward, invisible grace. This does not mean that you are worthless Philistine scum. Anyone who wants to can be surprised by the beauty or pain of the natural world, of the human mind and heart, and can try to capture just that—the details, the nuance, what is. If you look around, you will start to see. When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope. (p. 100-1)
From Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape edited by Barry Lopez (2006):
It has become a commonplace observation about American culture that we are a people groping for a renewed sense of place and community, that we want to be more meaningfully committed, less isolated. Many of us have come to wonder whether modern American life, with its accelerated daily demands and its polarizing choices, isn’t indirectly undermining something foundational, something essential to our lives. We joke that one shopping mall looks just like another, that a housing development on the outskirts of Denver feels no different to us than a housing development outside Kansas City, but we are not always amused by such observations. (p. xvi)
From An American Childhood by Annie Dillard (1987):
What does it feel like to be alive?
Living, you stand under a waterfall. You leave the sleeping shore deliberately; you shed your dusty clothes, pick your barefoot way over the high, slippery rocks, hold your breath, choose your footing, and step into the waterfall. The hard water pelts your skull, bangs in bits on your shoulders and arms. The strong water dashes down beside you and you feel it along your calves and thighs rising roughly back up, up to the roiling surface, full of bubbles that slide up your skin or break on you at full speed. Can you breathe here? Here where the force is greatest and only the strength of your neck holds the river out of your face? Yes, you can breathe even here. You could learn to live like this. (p. 150)